Marco Barisione is part of a team working on a desktop shell for the X-windows replacement Wayland. He’s posted up details of their recent work and included a rather nice video demo of how far they’ve got with it (see below). Here’s the Foundation’s coverage of the work so far.
Program the ATtiny85 from the #RaspberryPi
Instructables member prb3333 has written an extensive tutorial (with code) on programming an ATtiny85 microcontroller chip from the Pi. You have to do some compilation (of avrdude) first and wire the chip up in a certain way on a breadboard. The Tiny is a great way of getting into microcontrollers because it’s so cheap.
Review of ProtoLab breakout board for the #RaspberryPi from AlienSpec
The Average Man has got hold of one of these lovely prototyping boards from AlienSpec and has written a very detailed review of it’s capabilities here. You can buy one for £15 delivered from their eBay shop.
HDMIPi screens are a step closer for #RaspberryPi users
The slightly-delayed HDMIPi screen is a step closer today with the arrival in the UK of the first working driver board. Cyntech have been posting pictures on Twitter (see above) and Alex Eames from RasPi.TV is now waiting for his to arrive (he’s in Poland so it’ll be a few days). Expect some exciting video of the board in action very soon!
Foundation focus: Programming in Minecraft with the #RaspberryPi
This is the first in what I suspect will be a long series of posts in which I feature one of the education resources on the Raspberry Pi Foundation site.
This time, I wanted to point people at the introduction to programming inside Minecraft that is held in the ‘Learning’ section of the Foundation’s site. This is a fairly short tutorial to get you installing the software, generating messages inside Minecraft and programmatically building with blocks. If you haven’t given Minecraft a go yet, this is the place to start!
Visit this page to get started.
Once you’ve done this tutorial, you should take a look at Craig Richardson’s (@craigargh) website in which he explores more advanced Minecraft concepts.
Picademy Day One write-up – #RaspberryPi teacher CPD at Pi Towers!
Teacher Sway Grantham was one of the lucky ones who got a place on Picademy – a brand new 2-day course for teachers run by the folks at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The Foundation has recently moved into a spacious new office that gives them a classroom and multiple working spaces, perfect for this kind of event. So far, amongst several other things, the 24 teachers have programmed with Python and controlled a camera module, and done some training with Minecraft. You can read a full write-up of Day One here. You can follow the live tweeting of Picademy here or see it below.